


just make it easy for me to feel

by orphan_account



Category: Men's Football RPF, Music RPF
Genre: Alternate Universe, Alternate Universe - Bodyguard, Angst, Character Death, Childhood Trauma, Drug Dealing, Explicit Sexual Content, First work in this fandom and I’m gonna get cancelled, Heavy Angst, Heavy Drinking, Implied/Referenced Cheating, M/M, Musicians, Recreational Drug Use, Slow To Update, Smoking
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-12-26
Updated: 2019-12-26
Packaged: 2021-02-18 02:21:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,412
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21970123
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/orphan_account/pseuds/orphan_account
Summary: dele's a grime artist who's tired of life, eric is his new bodyguard.
Relationships: Dele Alli/Eric Dier
Comments: 19
Kudos: 44





	just make it easy for me to feel

**Author's Note:**

> general warnings: heavy drinking and drug use, frequent substance abuse, references to alcoholism, suicidal ideation, character death, violence, sex while intoxicated, sex while under the influence of drugs, use of homophobic slurs, discussion of physical and emotional childhood abuse, mentions of police brutality, infrequent racial slurs 
> 
> jacked the title from 3am by you me at six, because they're the little bastards who started my love of football. assholes.  
> anyways, voila.

**_ーLondon, England_ ** **_  
_** **_Tuesday, May 19, 2020_ ** **_  
_** **_3:00pm_ **

There’s a tension in the office, simmering like an unwatched pot, just about to boil over. 

Tension heavy and thick enough to crush the shining plexiglass and steel desk that stands between Dele and Lamela, growing, climbing the walls like smoke in a burning building. Dele looks at the paper in his hands and then back at Lamela, only his conscience keeping his jaw from hitting the floor. It’s also the only thing keeping him from reaching across the desk and throttling the money hungry bastard. 

Lamela flashes his ivory teeth.

Dele grits his. 

Nothing would feel better to Dele than knocking one of them out, watching his shark-like face contort in pain and feeling the sting of a fist after it meets its target… 

“We can, of course, make changes,” Lamela says, grinning again. It’s subtle, but Dele knows what he means - he’ll sure find a way to squeeze in an extra date here or there. 

Dele forces himself to shrug, noncommittally. He can feel his lip twitch, and Lamela notices immediately. His tongue craves the smokey burn of a cigarette, or, better yet, a joint. Part of him wants to ball up the paper and lob it at Lamela, and he almost lets it win. His hand twitches, crushing the crisp office paper a little. He wants nothing more than to fire the piece of shit, but legally, his hands are tied.

So he passes the paper to Ben, the only person he knows will be on my side with this. He gives it a once over, shrugs, passes it to Jesse, whose face lights up immediately. Knowing him, it’s not the prospect of disc jockeying hundreds of shows from behind a big screen that excites him. It’s the prospect of free weed, free booze, and a fat paycheck from the label at the end of it all. Kyle looks over his shoulder and nods, seemingly approving. Fucking backstabber. 

Dele sputters, indignant. 

“For Christ’s sake, are you kidding me?” His voice bounces off the desk and the walls, out into the hall. The clamor of interns and office workers outside seems to die off, a hush falling across the office as he leans forward, meeting Lamela’s eye, hoping his glare channels his rage as effectively as he thinks it does. 

“Is there a problem, Del?” Lamela’s voice is calm, but he can see his gelled hair start to wilt. Dele can only wish that the rest of him would too. 

“The fuck is this? I signed for a summer tour, this is just fucking excessive, Erik.” Dele snaps, snatching the paper out of Jesse’s hands and balling it up, throwing it across the desk. It misses Lamela, bouncing harmlessly off of a placque behind the desk and rolling across the wood floor. 

“Seriously, _nine_ goddamn shows in Los Angeles? The fuck do I need t’play more than one show in L.A. for?” Lamela rolls his eyes at that, leaning back in his office chair and affixing Dele with a look that makes it seem like it should be obvious. 

“Because you’re the next _thing_ , Del. People are putting big money on you. Not that you’d have noticed.” Lamela shrugs. The last comment stings, just a little, but Dele bites his tongue, trying to douse the fire pumping through his veins. He can’t let Lamela get to him. 

“Hey, not like you’ve got much else to do.” Ben says, placing a hand on Dele’s shoulder. He’s sort of right. Dele shrugs Ben’s hand off. 

“I do.” he mutters, thinking about the half-finished baggies of weed and shitty rolling papers he’d nicked off of Ché the other week, stashed in his sorely empty liquor cabinet, right next to his piss-poor, dodgy lighter. Thinking about his would’ve-been plans for the following handful of months. 

Get high, get drunk, party, get laid, maybe write a verse or two in the pale hours of the thirteenth hangover of the week. 

Avoid the press like the plauge, pawn all interviews and statements off on Ben or Kyle, trust them not to say anything too stupid, curse himself when they inevitably do. 

Find time to call his mum in the haze of everything, ask how she is, hang up after a few minutes. Get pissed after, drink away the sting of the non-memories of his non-family, put down the bottle after he thinks too hard about his mum, pick up a joint and smoke half a bag with Ché or Mikey or maybe Jesse, if he isn’t being too much of a dickhead. 

But it’s all soured now, because it doesn’t matter what he wants or what his plans are. It’s all just tour, tour, tour, every waking hour spent bleeding on the road, shuffling from state to state, sold out show to sold out show, venues bigger every cycle. Jesse says something about a light show, which Ben groans at, cuts right back at him with a snarky comment about how it’s basic and only exciting to the epileptic grandmothers in the crowd. Dele thinks for a second about how he’d marry Ben Davies if he were gay, but it’s interrupted by Lamela explaining how the dates may be switched around a little depending on the venues and how he can accommodate anyone’s requests. 

Jesse asks about a show in Atlanta, and Lamela agrees, saying he’ll look into finding a promoter or two down there. 

Dele isn’t sure who he wants to kill more, so he puts his mind on the upcoming shows, the tens of thousands of screaming people, none of whom he’ll ever see. Except for maybe a groupie or two, in their low cut tops and tight skirts, perfume leering at him. 

“Any other requests? Del?” Lamela asks, pointedly. Dele shrugs, lip twitching again. 

“Solo hotel rooms only. Condoms on the bus. The usual.” he says. 

Jesse makes some comment under his breath about divas, and Kyle squirms in his seat. Ben looks torn between cuffing Jesse upside the head and keeping up his uncomfortable, Ken doll-esque smile. 

Dele stalks out of the office, fingers itching for a joint. 

* * * 

She’s waiting outside his flat, a joint between her fingers, unlit, brought just for him. Dele stops, takes the perfectly rolled paper from her hand, uses his good lighter while she starts talking about her mum being a cunt again, curses and complaints rolling easy off of her tongue. There’s a faint hickey at the base of her neck, on the left side, just barely visible on her tan skin, past her brown hair. He wants to find it in himself to care, to work up a bit of jealousy like she’d want, but he can’t. Their arrangement just wasn’t like that. 

Once her little rant about her mother concludes, Dele jumps in with his own, going off about Erik and his crew and tour. 

“Sixty shows. Thirty each leg.” he tells her. She lights up for a second, a catlike grin working its way onto her face, and Dele knows what she’s thinking. If he were a sloppier, stupider man, he’d fall for whatever plot she was cooking up. Not that he can really blame anyone who does - Ruby’s absolutely gorgeous, a perfectly symmetrical face with sharp brows and sharper cheekbones. A dream girl, really, confident enough for herself and him as well. 

“Upstairs?” 

Dele wants to say no, because after Lamela’s grilling and Jesse’s bullshit, he’d rather get wasted and sleep off the two weeks leading up to tour, but afternoon sex is hard to turn down. So they end up half naked in the hall outside his bedroom, Ruby’s skirt left in the living room and his shirt clinging to his chest. 

The comedown is anticlimactic. 

Ruby cleans herself off and says something about getting dinner before she leaves for a shoot in Paris and he leaves for tour. Then she’s gone, the only proof of her being the hickey on his right collarbone and her bralette, flung over a chair in the kitchen. Dele sorts through his little stack of vinyls, settles on a red pressing of _TA13OO_ , and all but melts into the couch, abandoned half-joint lit again as the needle on his record player runs smoothly along the surface of the record. 

A dark part of his mind wanders off, thinks about the first venue they play, the one in Vegas. He wonders if it’d be enough to hang himself in the green room, finally get Lamela to fuck off for half a second. The funeral, like his death, would probably be grossly publicized. He wonders if his father would even bother to show, own up to what he made, but it feels unlikely.

The very thought of his father seems to sober him, and he takes an extra long drag just to pull himself away, blur the family pictures and focus on something better. 

Maybe the green room hanging isn’t such a bad idea. 

* * * 

**_ーLondon, England_ ** **_  
_** **_Saturday, May 30, 2020_ ** **_  
_** **_11:45am_ **

The studio lights are colored, casting neon shadows across Jesse’s face. Ben’s toying away with his electric kit, making the last couple of adjustments before they're supposed to start. There’s a skyscraper of makeup caked on Dele’s face, so much effort put into making him look effortless. He is, of course, the star of the show. Ben and Jesse are relegated to all black, Kyle watching from the booth, beside the radio presenters, both of whom looking at Dele like he’s some kind of tiger escaped from a zoo. Foreign, strange, maybe even dangerous. He can almost hear Ché making fun of the fact that he _still_ insists on having a live mix, live band, no pre-recorded bullshit like everyone else does these days. 

_Dead, you know what that is, dead._ He can even imagine Ché’s goofy, lopsided smile. _A band? Who’re you trying to be, some Linkin Park kinda thing?_

Dele spares half a glance Jesse’s way. He doubts Jesse would even know Linkin Park. 

“And we’re live, here at…” the female presenter starts, going on some convoluted introduction. Dele spares another glance at Jesse, who’s fiddling with something on his pad, foot trained on the loop pedal beneath his keyboard. For once, he genuinely looks like he knows what he’s doing. 

Then they’re live, and all Dele has to focus on is the beat, the bass fed right to his brain through his earpiece, rhyme after rhyme coming to him like muscle memory, words strung together in long verses, lines that he’d spent hours agonizing over in the studio. Until every beat had been bled and every line absolutely exhausted, he wouldn’t rest. 

One of the presenters - the male one, older, crosser looking - keeps making motions for Dele to self-censor, but he fails to heed him, recalling each line and delivering it on the beat. 

“Young Polyphonic, everyone!” the female presenter cuts in as the last plinks of Jesse’s keyboard die off. The studio lights dim, and Dele blinks, mopping sweat off his forehead as Kyle gestures for him to enter the booth. He knows he’ll have to do the interview eventually, there’s no getting out of it. Lamela had insisted on a tour promotion and a single promo to boot. But for the moment, Dele gestures to Kyle that he’ll just be another minute, and reaches for the studio case of plastic water bottles. 

* * * 

Finding out that your security is down is never a good thing. 

So when Lamela rings to say that Jan’s been taken to the hospital by his mate Toby after he broke his leg and dislocated his shoulder, Dele’s convinced the tour is off. Until Lamela rings three hours later to declare that Jan’s got a friend he swears by who will take his place in the security lineup. Kyle’s even vetted him, and Dele really wants nothing more than to throttle Kyle fucking Walker. 

As if it’ll help, Lamela promises that he’s got a gift for Dele once they touch down in the States. Dele rolls his eyes, tells him to fuck off, and hangs up. 

* * * 

**_ーLondon, England_ ** **_  
_****_Monday, June 1, 2020_ ** **_  
_** ******_10:00am_**

Ruby drops by as Dele’s packing for tour, bringing with her a bottle of goodbye whiskey and many kisses. So many, in fact, that Dele ends up a little distracted from packing, and twenty minutes later, Ruby’s in one of his old hoodies while he zips his last suitcase shut. 

“I’ll miss you.” she offers from her spot on his bed, hair slightly ruffled from their quickie and lower lip curled out in a melodramatic pout. Dele just sets his suitcase on the ground and leans over to kiss her on the forehead. 

“You should get dressed.” 

He wheels his two suitcases to the door, checks to make sure the fridge has been cleaned out and then Ruby has materialized beside him, one of the spaghetti straps on her silvery dress slowly sliding off her shoulder. She deftly steps into fluffy sliders and shrugs on a matching puffer coat to help Dele bring his suitcases down to where the cab waits on the curb. They hesitate for a second, standing on the pavement, cab door open. 

Finally, Ruby wraps her arms around him and says something about missing and being lonely in Paris. Dele stifles a laugh. They’re hardly exclusive, and with her looks, finding a boytoy in France shouldn’t be too hard. 

But he does his best to echo her sentiments, plants an ironically chaste kiss on her head, and climbs into the cab without a goodbye. She spares a second to wave him off, just until the cab speeds up. 

“Wife? Fiancee?” the cabbie asks as Dele lazily shoots a text to Ben, letting him know he’s on his way to the airport. He stifles another laugh. 

“No.” 

“Oh, girlfriend?” 

“Only when she wants to be.” 

The cabbie seems to wrestle with his words for the rest of the ride, affording Dele some much-needed peace and quiet, aside from the hum of the cab and the sound of wheels skidding outside.

Silence, however, proves to be in poor taste, as his mind returns to Ruby. He tries to recall a bit of her, a perfume she once wore or a curve of her hip, but he can’t. The lines of her face start to fade, lips and eyes no longer as striking as he once thought. 

_Only when she wants to be._


End file.
